Written by one of Turkey’s most prominent novelists, Orhan Pamuk, The Secret Face is a modern variant on the medieval grail quest of Parsifal. In the basic model, a young man abandons his home, is invited to an initiation ceremony, neglects to ask the proper question, and then wanders in the wilderness for years until he earns a second chance and finally attains the mystical experience of the grail. Kavur and Pamuk return to the original non-Christian model for this story, while setting it in the late twentieth century. The director orchestrates this fantastic, visionary tale with utterly convincing actors, a minimal score that often returns to the sounds of mourning and pealing bells, and a landscape of cobbled streets and towering trees, present at every crucial turning point as if witnesses from another time.